PSR J0540−6919
star
PSR J0540−6919 (PSR B0540−69) is a pulsar in the Tarantula Nebula of the Large Magellanic Cloud. It is the first extragalactic gamma-ray pulsar discovered. A rotation period of 50.569 milliseconds and is characteristic age of 1,670 years old.
History
This Crab-like pulsar was first discovered in X-rays in 1984 and subsequently detected at radio wavelengths. Astronomers initially attributed the glow to collisions of subatomic particles accelerated in the shock waves produced by supernova explosions, and it took more than six years of observations by Fermi's Large Area Telescope to detect gamma-ray pulsations from PSR J0540−6919.
In 2015, it was determined that PSR J0540−6919 is responsible for about half of the gamma-ray flux from the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. It was identified as a bright source of gamma radiation early in the Fermi mission.
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This entry incorporates text from “PSR J0540−6919” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.